on the subdued blue; her mother had insisted on the jewelry and the fashionably styled hair.
“I’m smarter than that,” said Ren, although she touched her hair, a little anxiously.
“I know,” replied the Baba Jaga. “I wouldn’t bother with a moron.” Then she continued: “Do you regret your wish?”
For a moment, Ren thought of Ry?, with a squeezing kind of nausea that seemed to accompany thoughts of him lately. But then she thought of Jakub and Anja, and of how oddly enough, the two of them and Felka were almost a family.
“I would never regret making someone happy,” she said. “My brother knew what he was doing. Jakub’s daughter didn’t have any choice in the matter. I can go on without Ry?. Jakub couldn’t.”
The Baba Jaga nodded. Her ugly face softened.
“I am sorry about your friend.”
The squeezing feeling tightened. Ren had been doing her best to separate the man from the monster, but every time she tried, she could only see Franciszek, dead on the edge of the moat.
“My friend died with my brother,” she said, in a hard voice. “The thing on the Mountain wasn’t him.”
“But it was him, Ren,” said the Baba Jaga. “Second soul or not, it takes a wicked creature to let that evil in. It takes a choice. Whoever he was, whoever he could have been—Koszmar chose his fate.”
“No one chooses a thing like that.”
Ren looked down. In her hands, she saw a black body, facedown in the mud. She saw her brother, falling straight down to hell. She saw the thing that had once been Koszmar.
“Couldn’t you bring them back?” she whispered. “If not Ry? and Koszmar, what about Franciszek? Lukasz needs him—”
“Death is not sleep,” cautioned the Baba Jaga. “One does not wake without consequences.”
“But Anja—” began Ren. “And the apple tree—the cider—”
“No, Ren,” said the Baba Jaga in a firm voice. “Let the dead rest. Their souls deserve peace.”
“Gross,” said Lukasz, wiping strzygi guts off his chipped broadsword. “Very gross.”
It had been two months since the battle for the Glass Mountain. He was on the outermost border of Kamieńa, so close to the edge of the forest that he could see the trees thinning up ahead.
Czarn pattered toward him over the corpses.
“That’s the last of them,” said the wolf, and howled.
Waiting for the signal to regroup, Czarn’s wolves filtered through the trees. His new Brygada Smoka troops—comprising Wolf-Lords, villagers, and a few nobles—followed suit. The Golden Dragon had taken care of every other dragon in the queendom, so apart from him and his brothers, no one else had antlers on their bridles.
Yet.
Beneath Król’s hooves, the ground was carpeted with strzygi corpses, all of them beheaded, and they reminded Lukasz—a little nauseatingly—of the mavka. He was glad they were finished. The sooner he could get back to Ren, the happier he’d be. Overhead, psotniki still chattered from the trees, and there were still a few rivers that none dared enter. But the strzygi, at last, were dead.
“We should be heading back,” said Lukasz, swinging astride Król.
Beside him, Raf reined up his own horse.
“Eager to get back to your pretty little vila, are you?” He grinned. He still had a poet’s eyes and a devil’s soul, but at least he wasn’t as bent on leading them all to their destruction.
“Careful,” said Lukasz as they turned the horses out to the path. “That’s my fiancée you’re talking about.”
“Never thought my little brother would be the first to get married,” observed Tadeusz, catching up with them. “I’ll tell you what this is, Raf. It’s damn embarrassing.”
“Yes, well,” said Raf, lighting a cigarette. “You and I have been dead for a few years.”
“Hey—no smoking, queen’s orders.” Lukasz knocked the cigarette out of Raf’s hands. “Besides, from what I hear, you’ve been making up for lost time.”
Rafa? grinned.
“Trying my best, little brother.”
The forest gave way to a newly paved road. It wasn’t just Rafa?; the whole queendom was making up for lost time. Queen Dagmara was eager to prove that she could be a good ruler, and her husband was terrified that his wife might disappear again if he wasn’t careful.
It had been difficult at first—a little overly political, in Lukasz’s opinion. But backed by the Dragon and the Leszy, the king and queen had reached a compromise with Ren. Her domain would remain the forest itself, and they would continue to rule the castle and village.
Ren seemed happy enough with the result. Anyway, now that she was a general in the king’s army, she had more than enough